Considering the last few posts are about stealth and detection I might as well kick this off:
I skip and short circuit stealth/detection as much as possible.
None of my players have built a stealth based characters - probably also because of the complexity with detection and the seemingly bad action econ when dealing with "actually getting Hidden".
I have two main problems with it:
- comparison explosion? Whenever you have to resolve who sees who (esp at init) you have to at worst compare a roll for each character on one side to all the perception DCs of the other side and this gets really slow for me [^1]
- tracking who currently sees who / at what detection levels they currently are to others
Any tips and tricks very much welcome:)
[^1]: Both me and PCs track chars digitally (pathbuilder) and it is definitely slow to gather this information quickly on a laptop. A sheet of paper with highlighted bonuses/DCs for both the party and NPCs would go a long way for this but our play table is rather small and already pretty packed :/
Wow you really went ham on this, thanks!
The table is not small small, more like narrow so there is just enough space for 4 players and their tablets and dice trays. We have erasable(?) grid map book in front of my side of the table (GM screen with laptop and dice tray behind, and that takes the whole width of the table).
We use miniatures (nothing fancy) to represent both PCs and NPCs but room boundaries are written on the grid with marker and that is about it, I do have some pane minis with stuff like rocks, pillars and trees but... reality is that my combats probably feel pretty barren when it comes to hiding/occlusion spots (now that I am thinking about this, I have probably not bothered because of this whole issue), I usually only sprinkle in stuff when it makes "logistical" sense to have it there.
Clipboard is actually really good idea for my setup, I can tuck it between the laptop and GM screen when not actively using and it is mostly out of the way for everything else.
I do like the init steps you take to resolve this, highest Perc DC vs lowest roll, if failed then note who sees who and go from there in the init order - to avoid longer pauses from me as GM.
I will probably return to your comment after we have to deal with stealth again lol.
Yeah. At least for my sessions, the biggest sources of stealth play tend to be things like bushes (which I scribble on my play mat like I'm 4 years old), or things like furniture, so I hear you. It's easy to say "here are all the ways stealth could happen", but the reality is that most spaces that people will actually spend time in will not have an abundance of hiding places, and trying to create them can feel very contrived. Feint gets used so much more often than Hide/Sneak.